When GitHub announced Atom [1] in June 2014, many observers sighed: Does the world really need yet another text editor? Well, the makers of GitHub are convinced it does. Sublime Text [2] might be convenient, but it is not genuinely configurable. On the other hand, Emacs and Vi are highly configurable, but not exactly convenient for the uninitiated.

The makers of GitHub know pretty well how the open source world ticks, and they have gotten very few things wrong thus far. Atom is no exception. Vi and Emacs only work as sustainably and well as they do because they are both open and have a large community. Consequently, GitHub plans to be involved long-term with the editor. Atom 1.0 was released on June 25, 2015, under an MIT license, but that does not rule out GitHub offering an enterprise variant of the editor at some time.

Atom Model

Atom is intended to help developers program desktop and web applications across multiple platforms. The software comes with syntax highlighting for various programming languages – from JavaScript, through Perl and Python, up to C, C++, or Java. At the end of the day, Atom is a variant of the Chromium browser, and the windows are no more than locally rendered web pages, from which the content can access the Node.js API.

Atom consists of an easily manageable core (Atom Core), with most other components available as Atom packages managed by the Atom Package Manager (APM). The core and the packages run on the Electron framework [3], which was previously known as the Atom Shell. The Atom Shell takes care of automatic updates, includes a Windows installer, creates crash reports, and delivers notifications. The functions are accessible through JavaScript APIs.

For simplicity's sake, the developers use and recommend CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript for working with Atom and Less as a replacement for CSS. That said, the editor can also be extended to include JavaScript and CSS.

Control Panel

After the installation – which could be somewhat less complex (see the box "Installing Atom") – developers are taken to a graphical interface (Figure 1). It comprises various panes that can be zoomed and rearranged as needed. The individual files in which a developer works are known as "buffers" in Atom-speak.

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libgnome-keyring-dev fakeroot gconf-service libnss3

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/node node /usr/bin/nodejs 10

git clone https://github.com/atom/atom
cd atom
git fetch -p
git checkout $(git describe --tags `git rev-list  --tags --max-count=1`)

Figure 1: Atom comprises flexibly arranged multiple panes.

After starting Atom, you find the directory tree for the current project in the left-hand pane. The code belongs in the large field in the middle. Pressing F11 takes you to full-screen mode; Atom opens the settings as additional tabs when you press Ctrl+, (Ctrl+<comma>), or when you select Edit | Preferences.

If you are uncertain how to proceed, you can tell the editor to show all available commands with Ctrl+Shift+P. A useful Flight Manual is also available online [6].

In the Reactor

Although the editor is still a fairly young project, it already comes with a number of useful features. To indent one or multiple lines of code, you select the text and pressing Tab. Shift+Tab moves the block of code to the left.

Auto-completion is also implemented, and the developers promise to expand this in the future. Right now, you can press Ctrl+Space to enable the feature and display alternatives to the element underneath the cursor.

When you access the settings (Ctrl+,) and mark the Soft Wrap checkbox below the Editor Settings section, the editor wraps the line at the end of the screen. Checking Soft Wrap At Preferred Line Length wraps the code after n characters. The line break border is marked by an invisible line; by default the length is 80 characters, but you can change this in the Preferred Line Length text box in the same section.

If you enable the Soft Tabs option, the editor automatically converts tabs to space characters; you can even define the number of space characters in the settings (Tab Length drop-down box).

Folding means hiding blocks of code (e.g., functions, loops) to simplify your view of the code. Folding is accomplished either with the small triangles that appear when mousing over the gutter or with Alt+Ctrl+[(fold) or Alt+Ctrl+] (unfold). The triangles are sometimes difficult to hit, causing the editor to jump suddenly to other snippets of code.